HDR Photography

After I posted the temple picture in my previous post and flickr stream, many people came back to me asking this question "What is HDR?". In this post I am going to answer that question and explain how to create one.

HDR Photography stands for High Dynamic Range Photography, it is basically a heavy post-processing technique that allows you to take complete control over the tone of a picture which cannot be achieved by normal means.

Lets take an example, you take any normal picture (JPEG/GIF/PNG, etc..) and try to adjust the brightness or contrast of the image using Photoshop or GIMP. You will soon notice that if one part of the picture gets the desired brightness, some other part of the picture will become very bright(overexposed) or very dark(underexposed), because of this you cannot modify the tone of any image to a great extent. HDR targets this problem and tries to give you better control over the tone of your image.

The idea behind HDR photography is to combine multiple pictures of a particular scene into a single image. Each of the source pictures are supposed to have different exposure settings, most of the HDR photos use 3 source images, one underexposed, one overexposed and one with normal exposure. When you combine multiple exposures into a single image, the post-processing software now has a range of exposure to work with (unlike a normal photo which has a fixed exposure value). This will allow the software to adjust the tone in a very different manner with complete control on every part of the image.

Let me take the following images

Underexposed Image

Normal exposure

Overexposed Image

All the 3 images represents exactly the same scene.

Now you need a software like PhotoMatix (proprietary) or QtPfsGui (open-source) to chew these images and create a intermediate .HDR file. Now this HDR can be toned with various algorithms in the software and you can produce a variety of tones of the HDR which can be saved as a normal JPEG or PNG. One such tone that I achieved with the above images is

Just look at the details of the temple sculptures and at the same time observe the tone of the clouds, none of the source images can show both of them. When we combine multiple images, we merge the "best" part of every photo which yields a very pleasant image.

You can see lot of good HDR pictures here.

Ponniyin Selvan - A Masterpiece

Few days back when I was in my friends house in Koramangala I noticed this book "Ponniyin Selvan" lying somewhere in a table. The novel belongs to Santy which he has brought from Chennai. Since no one was reading it I decided to give a try and started read the first few pages immediately, the first impression was good as any other novel. I always have this habit of losing interest after reading few chapters of any novel but surprisingly it didn't happen to me with this novel. I don't know what magic the author (Thiru. Kalki R Krishnamoorthy) has done with this novel, I was reading it without any boredom in any of the chapters.

The novel runs around 1000 AD when the Chola dynasty started growing big everyday and how they overcome internal politics and external threat from Pandyas. All the characters in this novel are true and the high level story-line is also true. The author talks about Chola culture, their majesty, traditions, kings, people, literature and country so beautifully that no one would decide to stop reading it. As I started reading this novel, my hunger to know about Cholas and their history increased which forced me to visit this wiki page often. Last week when I visited Thanjavur Temple, I really felt the temple so close to my heart because of this novel and it made me to dedicate this photo that I took for this novel.

I am just done with one part of this novel and I have 4 more to go.

If you interested in reading it online, the full novel is available here.

You can also download the PDF version from here (for free, no piracy).

Vijesh weds Abirami

It was a short and sweet trip to Tanjavur to see the wedding of Vijesh & Abirami. The wedding ceremony was very unique, all the mantras were chanted in Tamil which everyone including the marriage couple can understand. Adding to the beauty, few ancient songs were also sung (which I think is from Thiruppavai)

Wish them a very happy and prosperous married life!!

This time we also prepared a special card for the couple and here it is

More wedding snaps here.

After the wedding we made a visit to the Tanjavur Temple and I will pen about it soon.

Tamizh Padam

"Tamizh Padam" is a first of its kind in Indian Cinema. An Indian version of the "Scary Movie". Mirchi Shiva is a perfect fit for a movie like this and has done justice as a hero. There is no special story-line for the movie but still entertains the viewers till the end.

Indian Cinema has a lot of things that can be very easily spoofed and the movie taken advantage of that. The movie starts with a spoof of "Karuthama" in a village and then it moves to Chennai spoofing many other common things like

1. A 10 year old boy begins to pedal a bicycle and immediately becomes a youth hero - A over used concept in many movies.
2. Hero Intro and fight scene - A must in all Indian Movies
3. Poor hero challenging a rich guy and becomes a Crorepathi in one small song.
4. Actors aged more than 35 portrayed as college students and hero's friends - Another common thing done by Vivek for a long time. In this movie Veniraadai Moorthy, Manobala are hero's friend and they call each other a "machi", "maams".. lol..
5. Songs with weird lyrics which belongs to no language. There is a must watch song for Harris Jayaraj in this movie.

and many more.

Few other spoofs that impressed me were, Shiva attempting a "Anniyan" style murder using Buffalos, "Kandaswamy" threatening Basha's Raguvaran, "Thalapathi" spoof in the beginning, "Pokkiri" and "Kakka Kakka" spoofs in second half.

Overall, it is good entertainer if you are a tamil movie freak with humor sense for spoofs. :)

Will this ever change?

Getting your work done from a government office has been a PITA for most of us. My recent funny/painful experiences were to get a Learners License followed by Driving License.

My first experience was quite funny and hectic, but there is nothing much to complain about. Six months back, to apply for a LL I went to the Indranagar RTO on a Saturday and shocked to see a queue with more than 250 people before me. After 3 hours of waiting in the queue, I got my documents verified by the officer there. Lucky I was the second last person to get it signed that day, others were asked to come on Monday. Assuming the same luck would help me, I went into the LL Test room. All that I expected in the test was road signs, hand signals and the basic traffic rules, it is quite easy isn't it? But my head started to spin when I saw the questions, all the questions were tough and very ambiguous too. Some sample questions here

What is the allowed decibel limit of horn after 10PM in some NH-XX type of roads?

Which motoract law talks about hit and run cases?

A mad dog is chasing you while driving your bike, what will you do? (Options were really crazy for this question, one such option was "Kick the dog".. :))

etc...

For a moment I thought I am in the wrong exam hall, maybe this is some exam for the post of some traffic inspector. I cross checked the same with a neighbor candidate, just the look of his face confirmed he is also sailing in the same boat (some relief here) and it is definitely the LL test :). Hardly 10% of the candidates passed these tests. My luck didn't work here and was failed by just one mark. All my friends who got their license from Tamilnadu were laughing at me because in Tamilnadu failing in LL test is like failing in Kinder Garden. Somehow I managed to pass the test after multiple attempts standing in a similar queue and writing similar tests.

After 5 months with no other option left, I went for applying my Driving License. Before hand, my driving school person said there are two bribe schemes, I was told without bribe it is very tough to get the DL. Coming to the two schemes, the first one is a Rs. 300 scheme where the test is of decent difficulty and second one is for Rs. 450 and it is a very easy test. Since my LL was about to expire I don't want to risk so I chose the Rs.450 scheme and I handed over this money and other fees to the driving school. The next day after doing the formalities I had to wait from morning 10AM to noon 3PM to take the driving test, at last the inspector came to my car and asked me to move. He gave some real simple instructions like take left, reverse left, etc. It was easy and I did it confidently. After the test he started complaining that I drove very badly so he is not going to sign my papers. After much of argument, he asked me to talk to my driving school contact for further information. (Phew! some relief again)

A day later my driving school person said the inspector is expecting another Rs.150 for signing the papers. This is cruel, already Rs.450 given to conduct the test and now another 150 to sign the paper. Not everyone can give so much amount!! If I want to go for another test then I have to pay Rs.450 bribe again and also I don't want to waste another day and again start from the scratch, even if I do he will fail me again for no real reason. So finally paid another Rs.150 and they mailed me the driving license almost 20 days after taking the test. I feel as if I have climbed Mt. Everest.. :)

To try my luck, I also wrote to the RTO officials about the same in the form of an e-mail, but as expected no response till now. :)

Is there any real life Anniyan or Ramana? Will this situation ever change?

Whatz up??

Well, this week and the next few weeks are very happening for us folks in Bangalore. Yes, there are lot of changes that is going to happen.

Starting with Vijesh, this champ is going to get married so he just moved out of Bangalore on Monday. We partied heavily with him for the last one month because this could bring all the 8+ years of fun we had together to an end. I hope he gets some chance to visit Bangalore after his wedding on Feb 4th (This is a special day for me, its my parents wedding day too).

Next is Junior Santy, this guy also moved to Chennai last weekend. He is now happily settled with ebay.

Gethu Karthik, he will be leaving to UK soon and will be visiting Bangalore occasionally. He is looking forward to get transferred there permanently and I hope he gets it.

Coming to our local Guitarist Santy, he is leaving to California on next friday and will return after a month. This is his first foreign trip and it would be good if he can carry his Guitar with him (just like Surya in Vaarnam Aayiram). I wish, you perform in a stage rock music show in the US. Bon Voyage, be safe.. ;-)

Tom has already left for a spiritual trip to Egypt, Israel, etc. I hope he doesn't come back as a Saint.

Finally me, still waiting for my Driving License to be delivered... :)

Restart

Damn! I was lazy enough to pen down so many things that happened between my last post and this one. Maybe it has happened to many other people too, but yesterday when I was chatting with two of my colleagues (you can call us "3 Idiots"), we got enlightened that all 3 of us started a blog sometime or the other but never updated it in the past few months and we have to do something about it. So we decided to fix up things and do a restart on our blogs.

I always wonder how this guy keeps writing lively blogs every now and then. Even if it not going to be of that scale, I should write something.